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Terraform Junction VS

Alright buddies here's some hot local multiplayer territory control action. Your primary weapon is controlling the flow of resources in a shared arena. Get the most suitable swag for yourself while poisoning the opponent's income flow.

More precise gameplay instructions on the game page.

NEW! Further development is GO: the post-jam build contains a practice mode and usability improvements, with more to come.

Comments

For "An Unconventional Weapon", it would've been too obvious to make a platformer where you throw your equipment or something. I still found this theme inspiring in a sort of abstract way, like how it's really about conflicts in unusual scenarios.

Great concept, really needed to sit and think for a while about how to possibly make turns favorable when construction is randomized. Messing with the opponent seems pretty risky without a solid grasp of how resources will follow the paths. My first play turned the map into an incomprehensible mess. :P

Also to reword what's said in the description, resources will always go straight forward when they can. If they can't and have to make a decision, they'll turn counterclockwise. Factor in collisions and dead ends fizzing them out. Reading paths quickly is the core skill that can be practiced in this game.

Interesting game, probably one of the more unique games I've played during this jam. I really love the graphics and the sound, they go together really well. The game's confusing at first, and could use some more explanation, but after you get the hang of it it's really interesting. Nice job!

Played this with some friends just now, they loved it but pointed out how buildings should be differently colored for each owner, so you can plan roads more effectively (without bring the cursor to the building first to see who owns it). I think that might reduce the initial confusion.

Yeah player feedback is always the tricky part. I don't want to cram walls of text on screen for obvious reasons.

I figured a tutorial would defeat the point too. I'm giving the players a system, and it's up to them to find out what configurations are beneficial. I don't want to explicitly point out and create a bias toward certain strategies.

So the next best thing I could try was to make the system transparent - resources move around slowly enough, buildings have hopefully helpful descriptions, any text on screen updates in real time, etc.

Nice game, looks pretty polished and we liked the music.
It was not very clear to us how the game worked though. As others pointed out, coloured buildings and more clear feedback on how money is gained/lost would be helpful.

I ought to address things like that in a post-jam fix build. Tweaks in usability are technically trivial to implement. Since I consider the game feature-locked, it'd just be small hindsights that would communicate the coolness of these features better.

So I'm messing around with building colors: the base color is blue for Player 1 and red for Player 2, and it actually looks really neat.

Another improvement is that when a resource gives the floating -20/+20 text, that text is the color of that resource - a simple thing that underlines at a glance what sort of income was useful and what wasn't. (Maybe score updates should somehow flash the total score too..?)

The next thing I noticed is that all floating text should have a 1px outline for clarity.

Maybe the post-jam version could have some sort of practice/infinity mode too, with like arrows showing where the resource wants to go. I don't know, wouldn't want to overcomplicate things or cause feature creep.

Okey, almost everything is probably said already. :D.. But regardless, I liked the way you approached the theme, this is a good idea for a more polished game. The graphics are nice and the tune is good.

If I were to criticize anything it was mostly that I had hard time to separate the work of player 1 and 2 because of the colors. Other thing which I noticed were that controls were a bit difficult to grasp as I kept making circles with my own money! :)

More balanced? I'd appreciate some pointers about what felt unbalanced here.

Remember that everything, including your opponent's buildings and roads, is an asset. That's why it's possible to recover even from seemingly insurmountable cash differences. Playing this somehow "optimally" (well, at least without rushing through), Player 1 and Player 2 both usually have managed around $5000 in the end.

Ah, that's a bummer. Teeeeechnically it doesn't matter even if all the buildings are banks, then it just becomes a race to get the least minus points. But it is a bit silly, I'll see if I can add conditional RNG.

Hmm, I don't think I could do "just a" Simcity clone. Sim games are one of my favorite game types, but my sort of jam is weird conceptual takes on them.

Okay the dream is of course some kinda massive evolving simulation with learning AI and all that, but during game jams, I like to take one really specific aspect as the central theme and bring it to some sort of interesting conclusion. Like how logistics are the entire interface in this one.

Hey, I voted your game fairly. I gave you several stars in some categories. I always vote games fairly and objectively, no matter how bad their developer's PR.

You shouldn't assume things, you know. It's bad form.

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